Tuesday, December 5, 2017

Russia-gate hysteria is now an excuse for stifling U.S. dissent that challenges the New Cold War. Huffington Post had hosted Lauria articles since 2006 but retracted without explanation his 2017 article questioning Russia-gate-Consortium News, Joe Lauria

12/4/17, "How Russia-gate Rationalizes Censorship," Consortium News, Joe Lauria"Special Report: The Russia-gate hysteria has spread
beyond simply a strategy for neutralizing Donald Trump or even removing
him from office into an excuse for stifling U.S. dissent that challenges
the New Cold War, reports Joe Lauria."

"At the end of October, I wrote an article for Consortium News about
the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton’s campaign paying
for unvetted opposition research that became the basis for much of the
disputed story about Russia allegedly interfering in the 2016
presidential election on the orders of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The piece showed that the Democrats’ two paid-for sources that have
engendered belief in Russia-gate are at best shaky.First was former
British spy Christopher Steele’s largely unverified dossier of second- and third-hand opposition research portraying Donald Trump as something of a Russian Manchurian candidate.

And the second was CrowdStrike, an anti-Putin private company,
examining the DNC’s computer server to dubiously claim discovery of a
Russian “hack.” In a similar examination of an alleged hack of a
Ukrainian artillery app, CrowdStrike also blamed Russia but
used faulty data for its report that it was later forced to rewrite.CrowdStrike was hired after the DNC refused to allow the FBI to look at the server.

My piece also described the dangerous consequences of partisan
Democratic faith in Russia-gate: a sharp increase in geopolitical
tensions between nuclear-armed Russia and the U.S., and a New
McCarthyism that is spreading fear — especially in academia, journalism
and civil rights organizations — about questioning the enforced
orthodoxy of Russia’s alleged guilt.

After the article appeared at Consortium News, I tried to penetrate the mainstream by then publishing a version of the article on the HuffPost, which was rebranded from the Huffington Post in April this year by new management.As a contributor to the site since February 2006, I am trusted by HuffPost editors to post my stories directly online. However, within 24 hours of publication on Nov. 4, HuffPost editors retracted the article without any explanation.

This behavior breaks with the earlier principles of journalism that
the Web site claimed to uphold. For instance, in 2008, Arianna
Huffington told radio
host Don Debar that, “We welcome all opinions, except conspiracy
theories.” She said: “Facts are sacred. That’s part of our philosophy of
journalism.”

But Huffington stepped down as editor in August 2016 and has nothing to do with the site now. It is run by Lydia Polgreen, a former New York Times reporter and editor, who evidently has very different ideas. In April, she completely redesigned the site and renamed it HuffPost.

Before the management change, I had published several articles on the Huffington Post about Russia without controversy. For instance, The Huffington Post published my piece on Nov. 5, 2016, that predicted three days before the election that if Clinton lost she’d blame Russia. My point was reaffirmed by the campaign-insider book Shattered, which revealed that immediately after Clinton’s loss, senior campaign advisers decided to blame Russia for her defeat.

On Dec. 12, 2016, I published another piece, which the Huffington Post editors
promoted, called, “Blaming Russia To Overturn The Election Goes Into
Overdrive.” I argued that “Russia has been blamed in the U.S. for many
things and though proof never seems to be supplied, it is widely
believed anyway.”

After I posted an updated version of the Consortium News piece
— renamed “On the Origins of Russia-gate” — I was informed 23 hours
later by a Facebook friend that the piece had been retracted by HuffPost editors.
As a reporter for mainstream media for more than a quarter century, I
know that a newsroom rule is that before the serious decision is made to
retract an article the writer is contacted to be allowed to defend the
piece. This never happened. There was no due process.A HuffPost editor ignored my email asking why it was taken down.

Support from Independent Media

Like the word “fascism,” “censorship” is an over-used and mis-used
accusation, and I usually avoid using it. But without any explanation, I
could only conclude that the decision to retract was political, not
editorial.

I am non-partisan as I oppose both major parties for failing to
represent millions of Americans’ interests. I follow facts where they
lead. In this case, the facts led to an understanding that the Jan.
6 FBI/NSA/CIA intelligence “assessment” on
alleged Russian election interference, prepared by what then-Director
of National Intelligence James Clapper called “hand-picked” analysts,
was based substantially on unvetted opposition research and speculation,
not serious intelligence work.

The assessment even made the point that the analysts were not
asserting that the alleged Russian interference was a fact. The report
contained the disclaimer: “Judgments are not intended to imply that we
have proof that shows something to be a fact. Assessments are based on
collected information, which is often incomplete or fragmentary, as well
as logic, argumentation, and precedents.”

Under deadline pressure on Jan. 6, Scott Shane of The New York Times instinctively
wrote what many readers of the report must have been thinking: “What is
missing from the public report is what many Americans most eagerly
anticipated: hard evidence to back up the agencies’ claims that the
Russian government engineered the election attack. … Instead, the
message from the agencies essentially amounts to ‘trust us.’”

Yet, after the Jan. 6 report was published, leading Democrats
asserted falsely that the “assessment” represented the consensus
judgment of all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies – not just the views of
“hand-picked” analysts from three – and much of the U.S. mainstream
media began treating the allegations of Russian “hacking” as flat fact,
not as an uncertain conclusion denied by both the Russian government and
WikiLeaks, which insists that it did not get the two batches of
Democratic emails from Russia.

(There is also dissent inside the broader U.S. intelligence community
about whether an alleged “hack” over the Internet was even possible
based on the download speeds of one known data extraction, which matched
what was possible from direct USB access to a computer, i.e., a
download onto a thumb drive presumably by a Democratic insider.)

However, because of the oft-repeated “17 intelligence agencies”
canard and the mainstream media’s careless reporting, the public
impression has built up that the accusations against Russia are
indisputable. If you ask a Russia-gate believer today what their faith
is based on, they will invariably point to the Jan. 6 assessment and
mock anyone who still expresses any doubt.

For instance, an unnamed former CIA officer toldThe Intercept last
month, “You’ve got all these intelligence agencies saying the Russians
did the hack. To deny that is like coming out with the theory that the
Japanese didn’t bomb Pearl Harbor.”

That the supposedly dissident Intercept would use this quote
is instructive about how imbalanced the media’s reporting on
Russia-gate has been. We have actual film of Japanese planes attacking
Pearl Harbor and American ships burning – and we have the eyewitness
accounts of thousands of U.S. soldiers and sailors. Yet, on Russia-gate,
we only have the opinions of some “hand-picked” intelligence officials
who themselves say that they are not claiming that their opinions are
fact. No serious editor would allow a self-interested and unnamed source
to equate the two in print.

In this groupthink atmosphere, it was probably easy for HuffPost editors
to hear some complaints from a few readers and blithely decide to ban
my story. However, before it was pulled, 125 people had shared it. Ray
McGovern, a former CIA analyst and frequent contributor to Consortiumnews, then took up my cause, being the first to write about the HuffPost censorship on his blog. McGovern included a link to a .pdf file that I captured of the censored HuffPost story. It has since been republished on numerous otherwebsites.

Journalist Max Blumenthal tweeted about it. British filmmaker and writer Tariq Ali posted it on his Facebook page. Ron Paul and Daniel McAdams interviewed me at length about the censorship on their TV program. ZeroHedge wrote a widely shared piece and someone actually took the time, 27 minutes and 13 seconds to be exact, to read the entire article on YouTube. I began a petition to HuffPost’s
Polgreen to either explain the retraction or restore the article. It
has gained more than 1,900 signatures so far. If a serious fact-check
analysis was made of my article, it must exist and can and should be
produced.

Watchdogs and Media Defending Censorship

Despite this support from independent media, a senior official at
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, I learned,declined to take up my
cause because he believes in the Russia-gate story. I also learned that a
senior officer at the American Civil Liberties Union rejected my case
because he too believes in Russia-gate. Both of these serious
organizations were set up precisely to defend individuals in such
situations on principle, not preference.

In terms of their responsibilities for defending journalism and
protecting civil liberties, their personal opinions about whether
Russia-gate is real or not should be irrelevant. The point is whether
journalists should be permitted to show skepticism toward this latest
dubiously based groupthink. I fear that – amid the frenzy about Russia
and the animosity toward Trump – concerns about careers and funding are
driving these decisions, with principles brushed aside.

One online publication decidedly took the HuffPost’s side. Steven Perlberg, a media reporter for BuzzFeed, asked the HuffPost why they retracted my article. While ignoring me, the editors issued a statement to BuzzFeed saying
that “Mr. Lauria’s self-published” piece was “later flagged by readers,
and after deciding that the post contained multiple factually
inaccurate or misleading claims, our editors removed the post per our
contributor terms of use.” Those terms include retraction for “any
reason,” including, apparently, censorship.

Perlberg posted the HuffPost statement
on Twitter. I asked him if he inquired of the editors what those
“multiple” errors and “misleading claims” were. I asked him to contact
me to get my side of the story. Perlberg totally ignored me. He wrote
nothing about the matter. He apparently believed the HuffPost and that was that. In this way, he acquiesced with the censorship.

BuzzFeed, of course, is the sensationalist outlet that
irresponsibly published the Steele dossier in full, even though the
accusations – not just about Donald Trump but also many other
individuals – weren’t verified. Then on Nov. 14, BuzzFeed reporter Jason Leopold wrote one of the most ludicrous of
a long line of fantastic Russia-gate stories, reporting that the
Russian foreign ministry had sent money to Russian consulates in the
U.S. “to finance the election campaign of 2016.” The scoop generated
some screaming headlines before it became clear that the money was to
pay for Russian citizens in the U.S. to vote in the 2016 Duma election.

That Russia-gate has reached this point, based on faith and not fact,
was further illustrated by a Facebook exchange I had with Gary Sick, an
academic who served on the Ford and Carter national security staffs.
When I pressed Sick for evidence of Russian interference, he eventually
replied: “If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck…” When I told
him that was a very low-bar for such serious accusations, he angrily cut
off debate.

Part of this Russia-gate groupthink stems from the outrage – and even
shame – that many Americans feel about Trump’s election.

They want to
find an explanation that doesn’t lay the blame on the U.S. citizenry or
America’s current dysfunctional political/media process. It’s much more
reassuring, in a way, to blame some foreign adversary while also
discrediting Trump’s legitimacy as the elected president. That leaves
open some hope that his election might somehow be negated.

And, so many important people and organizations seem to be verifying
the Russia-gate suspicions that the theory must be true.

Which is an
important point. When belief in a story becomes faith-based or is driven
by an intense self-interest, honest skeptics are pushed aside and
trampled. That is the way groupthink works, as we saw in the run-up to
the U.S. invasion of Iraq when any doubts about Iraq possessing WMD made
you a “Saddam apologist.”

As the groupthink grows, the true-believers become disdainful of
facts that force them to think about what they already believe. They
won’t waste time making a painstaking examination of the facts or engage
in a detailed debate even on something as important and dangerous as a
new Cold War with Russia.

This is the most likely explanation for the HuffPost‘s censorship: a visceral reaction to having their Russia-gate faith challenged.

Why Critical News is Suppressed

But the HuffPost’s action is hardly isolated. It is part of a
rapidly growing landscape of censorship of news critical of American
corporate and political leaders who are trying to defend themselves from
an increasingly angry population. It’s a story as old as civilization: a
wealthy and powerful elite fending off popular unrest by trying to
contain knowledge of how the insiders gain at the others’ expense, at
home and abroad.

A lesson of the 2016 campaign was that growing numbers of Americans
are fed up with three decades of neoliberal policiesthat have
fabulously enriched the top tier of Americans and debased a huge
majority of the citizenry. The population has likewise grown tired of
the elite’s senseless wars to expand their own interests, which these
insiders try to conflate with the entire country’s interests.

America’s bipartisan rulers are threatened by popular discontent from
both left and right. They were alarmed by the Bernie Sanders insurgency
and by Donald Trump’s victory, even if Trump is now betraying the
discontented masses who voted for him by advancing tax and health
insurance plans designed to further crush them and benefit the wealthy.

Trump’s false campaign promises will only make the rulers’ problem of
a restless population worse. Americans are subjected to economic
inequality greater than in the first Gilded Age. They are also subjected
today to more war than in the first Gilded Age. American rulers today
are engaged in multiple conflicts following decades of post-World War II
invasions and coups to expand their global interests.

People with wealth and power always seem to be nervous about losing
both. So plutocrats use the concentrated media they own to suppress news
critical of their wars and domestic repression. For example, almost
nothing was reported about militarized police forces until the story
broke out into the open in the Ferguson protests and much of that
discontent has been brushed aside more recently.

Careerist journalists readily acquiesce in this suppression of news
to maintain their jobs, their status and their lifestyles. Meanwhile, a
growing body of poorly paid freelancers compete for the few remaining
decent-paying gigs for which they must report from the viewpoint of the
mainstream news organizations and their wealthy owners.

To operate in this media structure, most journalists know to excise
out the historical context of America’s wars of domination. They know to
uncritically accept American officials’ bromides about spreading
democracy, while hiding the real war aims.

Examples abound: America’s role in the Ukraine coup was denied or downplayed; a British parliamentary report exposing American lies that led to the destruction of Libya was suppressed;
and most infamously, the media promoted the WMD hoax and the fable of
“bringing democracy” to Iraq, leading to the illegal invasion and
devastation of that country. A recent example from November is a 60 Minutesreport on the Saudi destruction of Yemen, conspicuously failing to mention America’s crucial role in the carnage.

I’ve pitched numerous news stories critical of U.S. foreign policy to
a major American newspaper that were rejected or changed in the
editorial process. One example is the declassified Defense Intelligence
Agency document of August 2012 that accurately predicted the rise of the Islamic State two years later.

The document, which I confirmed with a Pentagon spokesman, said the
U.S. and its Turkish, European and Gulf Arab allies, were supporting the
establishment of a Salafist principality in eastern Syria to put
pressure on the Syrian government, but the document warned that this
Salafist base could turn into an “Islamic State.”

But such a story would undermine the U.S. government’s “war on
terrorism” narrative by revealing that the U.S.-backed strategy actually
was risking the expansion of the jihadists’ foothold in Syria.

The
story was twice rejected by my editors and has received attention almost
entirely — if not exclusively — on much-smaller independent news Web
sites.

Another story I pitched in June 2012, just a year into the Syrian
war, about Russia’s motives in Syria being guided by a desire to defeat
the growing jihadist threat there, was also rejected. Corporate media
wanted to keep the myth of Russia’s “imperial” aims in Syria alive. I
had to publish the article outside the U.S., in a South African daily newspaper.

In September 2015 at the U.N. General Assembly, Russian President Vladimir Putin confirmed my
story about Russia’s motives in Syria to stop jihadists from taking
over. Putin invited the U.S. to join this effort as Moscow was about to
launch its military intervention at the invitation of the Syrian
government. The Obama administration, still insisting on “regime change”
in Syria, refused. And the U.S. corporate media continued promoting the
myth that Russia intervened to recapture its “imperial glory.”

It was much easier to promote the “imperial” narrative and to ignore Putin’s clear explanation to French TV channel TF1, which was not picked up by American media.

“Remember what Libya or Iraq looked like before these countries and
their organizations were destroyed as states by our Western partners’
forces?” Putin said. “These states showed no signs of terrorism. They
were not a threat for Paris, for the Cote d’Azur, for Belgium, for
Russia, or for the United States. Now, they are the source of terrorist
threats. Our goal is to prevent the same from happening in Syria.”

Why Russia Is Targeted

So, where are independent-minded Western journalists to turn if their
stories critical of the U.S. government and corporations are
suppressed?

The imperative is to get these stories out – and Russian media has
provided an opening for some. This has presented a new problem for the
plutocracy. The suppression of critical news in their corporate-owned
media is no longer working if it’s seeping out in Russian media (and
through some dissident Western news sites on the Internet).

The solution has been to brand the content of the Russian television
network, RT, as “propaganda” since it presents facts and viewpoints that
most Americans have been kept from hearing. But just because these
views – many coming from Americans and other Westerners – are not what
you commonly hear on the U.S. mainstream media doesn’t make them
“propaganda” that must be stigmatized and silenced.

As a Russian-government-financed English-language news channel, RT
also gives a Russian perspective on the news, the way CNN and The New York Times give
an American perspective and the BBC a British one. American mainstream
journalists, from my experience, arrogantly deny suppressing news and
believe they present a universal perspective, rather than a narrow
American view of the world.

The viewpoints of Iranians, Palestinians, Russians, North Koreans and
others are never fully reported in the Western media although the
supposed mission of journalism is to help citizens understand a
frighteningly complex world from multiple points of view. It’s
impossible to do so without those voices included. Routinely or
systematically shutting them out also dehumanizes people in those
countries, making it easier to gain popular support to go to war against
them.

Russia is scapegoated by charging that RT or Sputnik are
sowing divisions in the U.S. by focusing on issues like homelessness,
racism, or out-of-control militarized police forces, as if these
divisive issues didn’t already exist. The U.S. mainstream media also
seems to forget that the U.S. government has engaged in at least 70
years of interference in other countries’ elections, foreign invasions,
coups, planting stories in foreign media and cyber-warfare.

Now, these American transgressions are projected onto Moscow.

There’s
also a measure of self-reverence in this for “successful” people with a
stake in an establishment that underpins the elite, demonstrating how
wonderfully democratic they are compared to those ogres in Russia.

The overriding point about the “Russian propaganda” complaint is that
when America’s democratic institutions, including the press and the
electoral process, are crumbling under the weight of corruption that the
American elites have created or maintained, someone else needs to be
blamed. Russia is both an old and a new scapegoat.

The Jan. 6 intelligence assessment on alleged Russian election
meddling is a good example of how this works. A third of its content is
an attack on RT for “undermining American democracy” by reporting on
Occupy Wall Street, the protest over the Dakota pipeline and, of all
things, holding a “third party candidate debates.”

According to the Jan. 6 assessment, RT’s offenses include reporting
that “the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least
one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’” RT also “highlights
criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil
liberties.” In other words, reporting on newsworthy events and allowing
third-party candidates to express their opinions undermine democracy.

The report also says all this amounts to “a Kremlin-directed campaign
to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest,”
but it should be noted those protests by dissatisfied Americans are
against privileges of the wealthy and the well-connected,a status quo
that the intelligence agencies routinely protect.

There are also deeper reasons why Russia is being targeted.

The
Russia-gate story fits neatly into a geopolitical strategy that long
predates the 2016 election. Since Wall Street and the U.S. government
lost the dominant position in Russia that existed under the pliable
President Boris Yeltsin, the strategy has been to put pressure on
getting rid of Putin to restore a U.S. friendly leader in Moscow. There
is substance to Russia’s concerns about American designs for “regime change” in the Kremlin.

Moscow sees an aggressive America expanding NATO and putting 30,000
NATO troops on its borders; trying to overthrow a secular ally in Syria
with terrorists who threaten Russia itself; backing a coup in Ukraine as
a possible prelude to moves against Russia; and using American NGOs to
foment unrest inside Russia before they were forced to register as
foreign agents. Russia wants Americans to see this perspective.

Accelerated Censorship in the Private Sector

The Constitution prohibits government from prior-restraint, or
censorship, though such tactics were imposed, largely unchallenged,
during the two world wars. American newspapers voluntarily agreed to
censor themselves in the Second World War before the government dictated
it.

In the Korean War, General Douglas MacArthur said he didn’t “desire
to reestablish wartime censorship” and instead asked the press for
self-censorship. He largely got it until the papers began reporting
American battlefield losses. On July 25, 1950, “the army ordered that
reporters were not allowed to publish ‘unwarranted’ criticism of command
decisions, and that the army would be ‘the sole judge and jury’ on what
‘unwarranted’ criticism entailed,” according to a Yale University study on military censorship.

After excellent on-the-ground reporting from Vietnam brought the war
home to America, the military reacted by instituting, initially in the
first Gulf War, serious control of the press by “embedding” reporters
from private media companies which accepted the arrangement, much as
World War II newspapers censored themselves.

It is important to realize that the First Amendment does not apply to
private companies, including the media. It is not illegal for them to
practice censorship. I never made a First Amendment argument against
the HuffPost, for instance. However, under pressure from
Washington, even in peacetime,media companies can do the government’s
dirty work to censor or limit free speech for the government.

In the past few weeks, we’ve seen an acceleration of attempts by
corporations to inhibit Russian media in the U.S. Both Google and
Facebook, which dominate the Web with more than 50 percent of ad
revenue, were at first resistant to government pressure to censor
“Russian propaganda.” But they are coming around.

Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said on
Nov. 18 that Google would “derank” articles from RT and Sputnik in the
Google searches, making the stories harder for readers to find. The
billionaire Schmidt claimed Russian information can be “repetitive,
exploitative, false, [or] likely to have been weaponized,” he said. That
is how factual news critical of U.S. corporate and political leadership
is seen, as a weapon.

“My own view is that these patterns can be detected, and that they can be taken down or deprioritized,” Schmidt said.

Though Google would effectively be hiding news produced by RT and Sputnik, Schmidt is sensitive to the charge of censorship, even though there’s nothing legally to stop him.

“We don’t want to ban the sites. That’s not how we operate,” Schmidt
said cynically. “I am strongly not in favor of censorship. I am very
strongly in favor of ranking. It’s what we do.”

But the “deranking” isn’t only aimed at Russian sites; Google
algorithms also are taking aim at independent news sites that don’t
follow the mainstream herd – and thus are accused of spreading Russian
or other “propaganda” if they question the dominant Western narratives
on, say, the Ukraine crisis or the war in Syria. A number of alternative
websites have begun reporting a sharp fall-off of traffic directed to
their sites from Google’s search engines.

Responding to a deadline from Congress to act, Facebook on Nov. 22
announced that it would inform users if they have been “targeted” by
Russian “propaganda.” Facebook’s help center will tell users if they
liked or shared ads allegedly from the St. Petersburg-based Internet
Research Agency, which supposedly bought $100,000 in ads over a two-year
period, with more than half these ads coming after the 2016 U.S.
election and many not related to politics.

(The $100,000 sum over two years compares to Facebook’s $27 billion
in annual revenue. Plus, Facebook only says it “believes” or it’s
“likely” that the ads came from that firm, whose links to the Kremlin
also have yet to be proved.)

Facebook described the move as “part of our ongoing effort to protect
our platforms and the people who use them from bad actors who try to
undermine our democracy.” Congress wants more from Facebook, so it will
not be surprising if users will eventually be told when they’ve liked or
shared an RT report in the future.

While the government can’t openly shut down a news site, the Federal Communications Commission’s upcoming vote on
whether to deregulate the Internet by ending net neutrality will free
private Internet companies in the U.S. to further marginalize Russian
and dissident websites by slowing them down and thus discouraging
readers from viewing them.

Likewise, as the U.S. government doesn’t want to be openly seen
shutting down RT operations, it is working around the edges to
accomplish that.

After the Department of Justice forced, under threat of arrest, RT to register its employees as foreign agents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act,
State Department spokeswoman Heather Nuaert said last Tuesday
that “FARA does not police the content of information disseminated, does
not limit the publication of information or advocacy materials, and
does not restrict an organization’s ability to operate.” She’d earlier
said that registering would not “impact or affect the ability of them to
report news and information. We just have them register. It’s as simple
as that.”

Then on Wednesday the Congressional press office stripped RT
correspondents of their Capitol Hill press passes, citing the FARA
registration. “The rules of the Galleries state clearly that news
credentials may not be issued to any applicant employed ‘by any foreign
government or representative thereof.’ Upon its registration as a
foreign agent under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), RT
Network became ineligible to hold news credentials,” read the letter to
RT.

Even so, Russia-gate faithful ignore these aggressive moves and issue
calls for even harsher action. After forcing RT to register, Keir
Giles, a Chatham House senior consulting fellow, acted as though it
never happened. He said in a Council on Foreign Relations Cyber Brief on
Nov. 27: “Although the Trump administration seems unlikely to pursue
action against Russian information operations, there are steps the U.S.
Congress and other governments should consider.”

I commented on
this development on RT America. It would also have been good to have
the State Department’s Nuaert answer for this discrepancy about the
claim that forced FARA registrations would not affect news
gathering when it already has. My criticism of RT is that they should be
interviewing U.S. decision-makers to hold them accountable, rather than
mostly guests outside the power structure. Tse decision-makers could be
called out on air if they refuse to appear.

Growing McCarthyite Attacks

Western rulers’ wariness about popular unrest also can be seen in the
extraordinary and scurrilous attack on the Canadian website globalresearch.ca.
The attack started with a chilling study by the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization into the relatively obscure website, followed by a vicious hit piece on Nov. 18 by the Globe and Mail, Canada’s
largest newspaper. The headline was: “How a Canadian website is being
used to amplify the Kremlin’s view of the world.”

“What once appeared to be a relatively harmless online refuge for
conspiracy theorists is now seen by NATO’s information warfare
specialists as a link in a concerted effort to undermine the credibility
of mainstream Western media – as well as the North American and
European public’s trust in government and public institutions,” the Globe and Mail reported. “Global Research is viewed by NATO’s Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence – or StratCom
– as playing a key accelerant role in helping popularize articles with
little basis in fact that also happen to fit the narratives being pushed
by the Kremlin, in particular, and the Assad regime.”

I’ve not agreed with everything I’ve read on the site. But it is a useful clearinghouse for alternative media.

Numerous Consortiumnews articles
are republished there, including a handful of mine. But the site’s
typical sharing and reposting on the Internet is seen by NATO as a plot
to undermine the Free World.

Drawing from the NATO report, The Globe and Mail’s
denunciation of this website continued: “It uses that reach to push not
only its own opinion pieces, but ‘news’ reports from little-known
websites that regularly carry dubious or false information.

At times,
the site’s regular variety of international-affairs stories is replaced
with a flurry of items that bolster dubious reportage with a series of
opinion pieces, promoted on social media and retweeted and shared by
active bots.”

The newspaper continued, “’That way, they increase the Google ranking
of the story and create the illusion of multi-source verification,’
said Donara Barojan, who does digital forensic research for [StratCom].
But she said she did not yet have proof that Global Research is
connected to any government.”

This sort of smear is nothing more than a blatant attack on free
speech by the most powerful military alliance in the world, based on the
unfounded conviction that Russia is a fundamental force for evil and
that anyone who has contacts with Russia or shares even a part of its
multilateral world view is suspect.

High-profile individuals are now also in the crosshairs of the neo-McCarthyite witchhunt. On Nov. 25 The Washington Post ran
a nasty hit piece on Washington Capitals’ hockey player Alex Ovechkin,
one of the most revered sports figures in the Washington area, simply
because he, like 86 percent of other Russians, supports his president.

“Alex Ovechkin is one of Putin’s biggest fans. The question is, why?”
ran the headline. The story insidiously implied that Ovechkin was a
dupe of his own president, being used to set up a media campaign to
support Putin, who is under fierce and relentless attack in the United
States where Ovechkin plays professional ice hockey.

“He has given an unwavering endorsement to a man who U.S.
intelligence agencies say sanctioned Russian meddling in last year’s
presidential election,” write the Post reporters, once again showing
their gullibility to U.S. intelligence agencies that have provided no
proof for their assertions (and even admit that they are not asserting
their opinion as fact).

Less prominent figures are targeted too. John Kiriakou, a former CIA
agent who blew the whistle on torture and was jailed for it, was kicked off a panel in Europe on Nov. 10 by a Bernie Sanders supporter who refused to appear with Kiriakou because he co-hosts a show on Radio Sputnik.

Then last week, Reporters Without Borders, an organization supposedly
devoted to press freedom, tried to kick journalist Vanessa Beeley off a
panel in Geneva to prevent her from
presenting evidence that the White Helmets, a group that sells itself
as a rescue organization inside rebel-controlled territory in Syria, has
ties to Al Qaeda. The Swiss Press Club, which hosted the event,
resisted the pressure and let Beeley speak.Russia-gate’s Hurdles

Much of this spreading global hysteria and intensifying censorship
traces back to Russia-gate. Yet, it remains remarkable that the
corporate media has failed so far to prove any significant Russian
interference in the U.S. election at all.Nor have the intelligence
agencies, Congressional investigations and special prosecutor Robert
Mueller. His criminal charges so far have been for financial crimes and
lying to federal authorities on topics unrelated to any “collusion”
between the Trump campaign and Russians to “hack” Democratic emails.

There may well be more indictments from Mueller, even perhaps a
complaint about Trump committing obstruction of justice because he said
on TV that he fired Comey, in part, because of the “Russia thing.” But
Trump’s clumsy reaction to the “scandal,” which he calls “fake news” and
a “witch hunt,” still is not proof that Putin and the Russians
interfered in the U.S. election to achieve the unlikely outcome of
Trump’s victory.

The Russia-gate faithful assured us to wait for the indictment of
retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, briefly Trump’s national security
adviser. But again there was nothing about pre-election “collusion,”
only charges that Flynn had lied to the FBI or omitted details about two
conversations with the Russian ambassador regarding policy matters
during the presidential transition, i.e., after the election.

And, one of those conversations related to trying unsuccessfully to
comply with an Israeli request to get Russia to block a United Nations
resolution censuring Israel’s settlements on Palestinian land.

As journalist Yasha Levine tweeted: “So the country that influenced
US policy through Michael Flynn is Israel, not Russia. But Flynn did try
to influence Russia, not the other way around. Ha-ha. This is the
smoking gun? What a farce.”

There remain a number of key hurdles to prove the Russia-gate story.
First, convincing evidence is needed that the Russian government indeed
did “hack” the Democratic emails, both those of the DNC and Clinton’s
campaign chairman John Podesta – and gave them to WikiLeaks. And,
further that somehow the Trump campaign was involved in aiding and
abetting this operation, i.e., collusion.

There’s also the question of how significant the release of those
emails was anyway. They did provide evidence that the DNC tilted the
primary campaign in favor of Clinton over Sanders; they exposed the
contents of Clinton’s paid speeches to Wall Street, which she was trying
to hide from the voters; and they revealed some pay-to-play features of
the Clinton Foundation and its foreign donations.

But – even if the Russians were involved in providing that
information to the American people – those issues were not considered
decisive in the campaign. Clinton principally pinned her loss on FBI
Director James Comey for closing and then reopening the investigation
into her improper use of a private email server while Secretary of
State. She also spread the blame to Russia (repeating
the canard about “seventeen [U.S. intelligence] agencies, all in
agreement”), Bernie Sanders, the inept DNC and other factors.

As for the vaguer concerns about some Russian group “probably” buying
$100,000 in ads, mostly after Americans had voted, as a factor in
swaying a $6 billion election, is too silly to contemplate.

That RT and Sputnik ran pieces critical of Hillary Clinton was their right, and they were hardly alone. RT and Sputnik‘s reach in the U.S. is minuscule compared to Fox News,
which slammed Clinton throughout the campaign, or for that matter,
MSNBC, CNN and other mainstream news outlets, which often expressed open
disdain for Republican Donald Trump but also gave extensive coverage to
issues such as the security concerns about Clinton’s private email
server.

Another vague Russia-gate suspicion stemming largely from Steele’s
opposition research is that somehow Russia is bribing or blackmailing
Trump because Trump has done some past business with Russians. But there
are evidentiary and logical problems with these theories, since some lucrative deals fell through
(and presumably wouldn’t have if Trump was being paid off) — and no
one, including the Russians, foresaw Trump’s highly improbable election
as U.S. President years earlier.

Some have questioned how Trump could have supported detente with
Russia without being beholden to Moscow in some way. But Jeffery
Sommers, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, wrote a convincing essay explaining
adviser Steve Bannon’s influence on Trump’s thinking about Russia and
the need for cooperation between the two powers to solve international
problems.

"Joe Lauria is a veteran foreign-affairs journalist. He has
written for the Boston Globe, the Sunday Times of London and the Wall
Street Journal among other newspapers. He is the author of How I Lost By Hillary Clinton published by OR Books in June 2017."...